Survivors celebrate season

Left with little after typhoon, Filipinos mark Christmas with help from neighbors, aid agencies

Philippine survivors of deadly Super Typhoon Haiyan prepared on Tuesday to celebrate Christmas in their ruined communities.

Pigs were being roasted, festive trees adorned the streets and churches were filled to overflowing.

"Nothing can stop us from welcoming Christmas, even though we have lost our home," 63-year-old butcher's wife Ellen Miano said from a tiny shanty home amid a field of debris in the central city of Tacloban.

The typhoon's 315 km/h winds flattened the Magallanes area on Tacloban's coast with giant waves on Nov 8.

Tacloban and nearby districts accounted for more than 5,000 of the 6,000-plus confirmed deaths, with nearly 2,000 others missing, making it the country's deadliest storm and one of its worst natural disasters.

The typhoon left 4.4 million homeless and caused damage put at $12.9 billion, according to the government, which estimates that it will take the affected central region, an area the size of Portugal, four years to recover.

Miano, who lives with her husband and four young nephews and nieces in the 2x3-meter home put together from salvaged wood and sheet metal, said the family would eat a Christmas dinner at midnight, with fried noodles and sliced bread given to them by a relief agency.

Their 20-year-old neighbor Ronfrey Magdua built a 4-meter-tall star-shaped lantern using salvaged wood, and wrapped in the Philippines' red, white and blue national flag. It was put up in the yard of a family that perished in the disaster.

"I made this in honor of the dead," the jobless young man said, adding that he spent about 2,000 pesos ($45) of his savings on the project.

Water and electricity have only been restored to a few commercial areas in Tacloban, a once-bustling city of more than 221,000.

But amid the damage, many are trying to restore normality, rebuilding their homes from salvaged scrap or with material bought with money provided by aid agencies. Others huddle in tents provided by the United Nations.

Some survivors have received small amounts of cash from the UN, the Philippine government and other aid groups.

The UN's World Food Programme has handed out 1,300 pesos to 18,000 of the poorest families in Tacloban and nearby areas, spokeswoman Amor Almagro said.

The UN agency plans to provide $6 million to 100,000 families in the next few weeks. Other agencies are financing government schemes where people who lost their jobs are paid the minimum daily wage to clear debris from roads, Almagro said.

The small dining table in the shanty home of carpenter's wife and mother-of-two Jean Dotado, 31, in the town of Palo was laden with apples, oranges, grapes, sliced bread and peanut butter, funded by the UN handout.

"This should get us through Christmas," said Dotado, whose makeshift home, comprising of roofing and planks scavenged from a school destroyed by the typhoon, also contained sardines, sacks of rice and instant noodles from aid groups.

Dotado's neighbor Shirley Dinalo, 20, said she would use the cash handout to buy medicine for her two daughters, aged 2 and 4, who have colds.

The family is staying with her in-laws after its own house was destroyed by storm surges. She said her husband, a van driver, did not have any money and the family was not planning to do anything special for Christmas.

"When it rains hard I lie in bed, unable to sleep, worrying that a typhoon will hit us again," she said.

Despite continuing hardship, damaged churches in Tacloban and nearby towns opened early on Tuesday for the last of the pre-dawn masses held in the 10 days until Christmas Eve.

"There will always be something beautiful that will come after what happened to us," Bernardo Pantin, the parish priest of Palo, near Tacloban, told about 100 parishioners at a makeshift church made from coconut lumber and blue tarpaulin. "It (the typhoon) changed our lives, but we know that good things will follow. But of course it will take time," Pantin said.

For some, though, it is hard to be optimistic.

In the Palo parish of San Joaquin, 6-year-old Clifford Cobacha and his uncle Rico Cobacha, 27, attended a pre-dawn mass and later lit candles in the church courtyard in front of three small wooden crosses marking the graves of the boy's mother and two brothers.

More than 300 other bodies are buried in the courtyard, marked with small wooden crosses. "It will be difficult to celebrate Christmas after we lost 15 relatives," the elder Cobacha said. Eight of them lie amongst the mass graves, with seven others, including the boy's father, still missing.

Agence France-Presse

(China Daily 12/25/2013 page10)